Canadian artist Jude Griebel will bring Illuminated Collapse, a series of unsettling, thought-provoking diorama meldings of the human body and its environment, to the Moose Jaw Museum & Art Gallery, with an Artist's Talk and official reception starting things off.
"I grew up mostly between Saskatchewan and rural Alberta," Griebel, who now works mostly out of New York, told MooseJawToday.com. "I was interested in landscapes from a young age due to my family's farming background, looking at land and how it's used, and how the body relates to it in various ways. And when I began making art, again at a young age, it was always preoccupied with our bodies' relationship to the surrounding world."
Griebel's Illuminated Collapse will open on Friday, Feb. 2, and run until May 5. On Feb. 2, the Moose Jaw Museum & Art Gallery's (MJMAG) doors will open at 7 p.m., with Jude Griebel presenting at 7:30.
The exhibition, pieces of which have already made their way across the continent, consists of six deeply detailed, large-scale dioramas depicting a series of meldings of human anatomy with landscapes in various stages of construction and destruction.
"You can imagine, growing up partly on a farm, there was a real interest in things being grown in the ground, being consumed, things going back into the ground," Griebel said. "Later on, as an art student and in my early career as an artist, I really started looking back at art history and the ways artists have depicted our relationship to the land, especially in very imaginative ways.
"More broadly, I started looking at the way land is being treated, in terms of hyper-active development, industrial agriculture, how we're taking and consuming at a voracious rate. And then, I began creating works in which the body and the landscape are merged, to speak to the ways we impact the world around us."
Like most artists, Griebel doesn't like telling audiences how his work should be interpreted. He wants gallery-goers to look closely at the details — scientific advancements, natural vs artificial, discomfiting anatomical elements, the growth of plants vs the growth of skyscrapers — and examine the thoughts and feelings that arise from their individual lens.
Nevertheless, he makes clear his theme of the philosophical blurriness of the lines typically drawn between viewers and the world around them, even if they reach different conclusions than he has or are free from the worry and anxiety he feels.
"The idea, really, is that everything is very intertwined. People usually put up these clear distinctions between themselves and the surrounding world when they're taking from it and using it in various ways. By combining body and landscape, what I'm doing is speaking to how when we take from the world and consume it, it is in turn affecting us, so I'm erasing those borders.
"For myself," Griebel continued, "it is a reflection of reality, but I'm reflecting reality in very metaphorical and imaginative ways, so I'm injecting a lot of personal anecdotes, and fiction and fantasy, to speak to larger problems in this world."
Greibel is also aware that all the materials he uses have a footprint, that he is part of the cycle of production, consumption, and waste, and that his exhibitions use infrastructure to travel and to be installed and lighted and shown in galleries.
"There's a lot of collective culpability in the art," he said, "which is sort of the bind we find ourselves as active consumers in this world. But it's also a place to criticize that from."
This will be Griebel's second time at the MJMAG — he was one of the artists included in 2019's award-winning Prairie Vernacular folk art exhibition. He visited Moose Jaw for the occasion and gave a talk with Victor Cicansky and other fellow artists.
"I'm happy to be visiting again for this solo exhibition, especially to be able to chat with visitors and answer questions (at the reception). ... It's a great conversation starter in terms of discussing the themes the body of work is looking at," he said.
Griebel currently has various exhibitions across North America from Banff to Chicago, Ottawa to New York. Check out his website at www.judegriebel.com to learn more and see images of his many sculptures.
Learn more about past, current, and upcoming exhibitions in Moose Jaw at www.mjmag.ca.
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